On September 27th, D&S Fellow Taeyoon Choi released the first two chapters of his online-book “Poetic Computation: Reader,” which looks at code as a form of poetry as well as the ethics behind it. As an online-book, readers have the unique experience of customizing the design elements of the text to their preferred standards as they read.

Choi is co-founder of The School for Poetic Computation based in New York City, and the book is based off of two of his lectures from the curriculum. The following chapters will be published later this year.

D&S researchers Madeleine Clare Elish and Tim Hwang discuss the social challenges of AI in a new collection of essays, An AI Pattern Language.

In A Pattern Language, the central problem is the built environment. While our goal here is not as grand as the city planner, we took inspiration from the values of equity and mutual responsibility, as well as the accessible form, found in A Pattern Language. Like those patterns, this document attempts to develop a common language of problems and potential solutions that appear in different context and at different scales of intervention.

D&S artist-in-residence Ingrid Burrington published a new book, Networks of New York: An Illustrated Guide to Urban Infrastructure, which is an iteration of Burrington’s published field guide.

It’s the single most essential aspect of modern life, and yet, for many of us, the Internet looks like an open browser, or the black mirrors of our phones and computers. But in Networks of New York, Ingrid Burrington lifts our eyes from our screens to the streets, showing us that the Internet is everywhere around us, all the time—we just have to know where to look.

D&S advisor Dr. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus explore the social and cultural effects of the pervasive practice of turning everyday experiences into data and offer insights into how these data can be used to educate:

People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. The term quantified self (popularized by journalist Gary Wolf) refers to how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, as well as to the tools they use and the communities they become part of. This book describes what happens when people turn their everyday experience—in particular, health and wellness-related experience—into data, and offers an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of the quantified self. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus consider the quantified self as a social and cultural phenomenon, describing not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how the quantified self enables users to connect to, and learn from, others.

D&S advisor Alondra Nelson’s book tracing how claims about ancestry are marshaled together with genetic analysis in a range of social ventures:

DNA has been a master key unlocking medical and forensic secrets, but its genealogical life has also been notable. Genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the United States, and the outpouring of interest in it from the African American community has been remarkable. After personally and professionally delving into the phenomenon for more than a decade, Alondra Nelson realized that genetic testing is being used to grapple with the unfinished business of slavery. It is being used for reconciliation, to establish ties with African ancestral homelands, to rethink citizenship, and to make unprecedented legal claims for slavery reparations based on genetic ancestry. Arguing that DNA offers a new tool for enduring issues, Nelson shows that the social life of DNA is affecting and transforming twenty-first-century racial politics.

D&S fellow Mimi Onuoha along with Jeanne Pinder and Jan Schaffer at the Tow Center have put together a comprehensive guide on crowdsourcing. The guide is organized around a journalism-related definition of crowdsourcing and provides ‘a new typology designed to help practitioners and researchers understand the different ways crowdsourcing is being used both inside and outside the newsrooms.’

In this report D&S advisor Nick Grossman and Elizabeth Woyke examine the “gig economy” and the ways it is reshaping the modern workforce:

It’s difficult to ignore the effects of the “great unbundling” today. The digital revolution has already changed the nature of media, personal health, finance, and other economic and industrial sectors in recent years. As this O’Reilly report reveals, the modern workforce—including the very notion of a “job” itself—is undergoing a similar transformation.

Unbundling is the breaking up of traditional packages of goods and services into their component parts, eventually to be rebundled in new ways. In the same fashion, various job components—income, structure, social connections, meaning, and (in the US) access to healthcare—are being unbundled as well.

“Leveraging Big Data and 21st century technology to renew cities and citizenship in America
The Responsive City is a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age that will help leaders link important breakthroughs in technology and data analytics with age-old lessons of small-group community input to create more agile, competitive, and economically resilient cities. Featuring vivid case studies highlighting the work of pioneers in New York, Boston, Chicago and more, the book provides a compelling model for the future of governance. The book will help mayors, chief technology officers, city administrators, agency directors, civic groups and nonprofit leaders break out of current paradigms to collectively address civic problems. The Responsive City is the culmination of research originating from the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative, an ongoing project at Harvard Kennedy School working to catalyze adoption of data projects on the city level. The book is co-authored by Professor Stephen Goldsmith, director of Data-Smart City Solutions at Harvard Kennedy School, and Professor Susan Crawford, co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg penned the book’s foreword.

Based on the authors’ experiences and extensive research, The Responsive City explores topics including:

Building trust in the public sector and fostering a sustained, collective voice among communities;

Using data-smart governance to preempt and predict problems while improving quality of life;

Creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer money with digital tools; and
Spearheading these new approaches to government with innovative leadership.”

D&S fellow Ingrid Burrington’s popular field guide which, in the style of an Audubon Society bird book, enumerates the street markings and network devices located throughout NYC’s public spaces.

An online field guide to network infrastructure is an OK way to share information about infrastructure, but when you are out in the world actually seeing infrastructure maybe you don’t want to pull up some website on your phone.

So, here’s a book. The book has lots of cool extra things that aren’t on this website, like lengthy narratives about the NYPD’s surveillance apparatus and high-frequency trading. If you’re into those sorts of things, you might like this book!